is now director, infrastructure and operations at Westpac Group, based in Sydney. He is responsible for developing transformation plans to improve the overall operation and delivery of technology across the Group.

Before this, Millett was interim CIO at Westpac NZ. The CIO post is now held by Dawie Olivier, who was previously Executive Head of Group Technology Build at Standard Bank Group in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Arian de Wit is now IT manager at Planet Innovation in Melbourne.

Planet Innovation is a consultancy providing technology innovation, product development and commercialisation expertise to companies around the world. It focuses on the biomedical, clean-tech and hi-tech industries.

Before joining Planet Innovation, de Wit worked for three months as a digital consultant to the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, where he led an independent review of internal digital capability and the future roadmap of the organisation.

De Wit moved to Australia following more than seven years as general manager – information and technology at National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Arian de Wit (right) at a CIO roundtable on ‘Navigating the new workplace’.

Fitzgerald will work on Information Leadership's iWorkplace SharePoint deployments. In her previous role as infrastructure manager at one of New Zealand’s leading tertiary providers, Fitzgerald was responsible for a complex environment including Microsoft products, virtualisation using HyperV and VMWare, Cisco voice and data and SQL and Oracle databases.

Intergen takes top prize at Microsoft Partner Awards

Intergen has won the 2015 Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award for New Zealand. This is the third time the company has won the award.

Awards were presented in several categories, with winners chosen from a set of more than 2,300 entrants from 108 different countries worldwide. Intergen was recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services, as well as representing excellent subsidiary engagement in New Zealand.

It is important for us to reward the future stars of the New Zealand IT industry as they start thinking about what a career in technology might look like.

The Intergen Young Achiever Awards are aimed at acknowledging the success of the three best performing students in INFO101: Foundations of Information Systems.

First place in the Intergen Young Achiever awards went to Victor Mangan, who received a Microsoft Surface 3. Second place prize winners, Gus Umali and Angus Allan, received Microsoft Lumia Windows Phones.

The three were also invited to join Intergen’s 2016 graduate intake at the company’s annual bootcamp.

“As an employer in the IT sector we believe it is our role to be encouraging graduates into IT roles in what is a resource constrained industry,” says Simon Bright, Intergen CEO. “It is important for us to reward the future stars of the New Zealand IT industry as they start thinking about what a career in technology might look like."

Auckland Uni team off to Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals in the US

An app designed by three University of Auckland students that connects people to work opportunities through social networks has earned its creators a finalist placing in the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals to be held in Seattle, US, next month.

Called ‘Tether’ , the app is the brainchild of University of Auckland students Alyssa Ong, Vivien Lei and Opender Singh. The app allow users to actively search their extended social network for people with matching skills and connect them with casual jobs.

Team Tether won first place at the 2015 Microsoft NZ Imagine Cup competition in March this year, as well as the Faculty of Science prize at the University of Auckland Spark Entrepreneurship Challenge in May. They also ranked top of the Innovation category in the Asia-Pacific region for the Imagine Cup World semifinals.

New Zealand has traditionally punched well above our weight in the world Imagine Cup competitions, with Kiwi teams featuring in the top ten teams globally for five out of the past six years.

Nigel Parker, Microsoft

All finalists will now continue to develop and improve their projects to get them ready to present at the World Finals competition next month. They have a chance to win cash prizes and a private meeting with Microsoft global CEO Satya Nadella.

Nigel Parker, Microsoft New Zealand’s Director of Developer Experience, says the competition helps encourage New Zealand students into a career in IT and innovation.

“Around 2,000 tertiary students participated in the NZ Imagine Cup competition this year, which is just 1 per cent of the 200,000 participants globally,” says Parker. “New Zealand has traditionally punched well above our weight in the world Imagine Cup competitions, with Kiwi teams featuring in the top ten teams globally for five out of the past six years.”

Copyright 2018 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.